Cowlishaw: With new season (and hope) on horizon, Cowboys put 2011 behind them

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G.J. McCARTHY/Staff Photographer

Will this be a season Cowboys fans can celebrate or another year in which planning for the playoffs blow up in their faces? DMN beat writer Brandon George takes a look at each game on the Cowboys schedule to determine how Dallas will do this season.

Football is the least charitable of team sports. Whereas there is almost always a tomorrow in baseball, basketball or hockey, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell was ridiculed for trying to extend his league’s schedule to 18 games — precisely one-ninth of a major league season.

In the NFL, one mistake leading to one defeat can dash the hopes of an entire season.

And yet it’s as though the Cowboys get the rarest of do-overs when they visit MetLife Stadium to open the NFL season Wednesday night. Usually mulligans apply only to golf … and not to legitimate golf.

As you probably recall, 2012 (the calendar year, not the season) began with the Cowboys and Giants meeting in this same venue with first place in the NFC East at stake.

The Cowboys went meekly into the New Jersey night, losing 31-14 and raising even more questions about a suspect defense than they could have imagined possible. The Giants became a freight train, rolling past Atlanta, Green Bay, San Francisco and, finally, New England to capture another Super Bowl.

Yet ask Cowboys coach Jason Garrett about that night or about the thought process that would say the Cowboys weren’t that far removed from a Super Bowl, and it’s as if the entire game never took place.

“The way we are approaching this is that 2011 is over with, and this is 2012,” Garrett said.

It’s a genius approach, not so much because it reflects a Princeton degree but because it provides a much-needed second chance for a franchise sorely in need of one after another failed season.

The Cowboys don’t achieve a lot of firsts these days — that was left mainly to teams of the ’70s and ’90s — but this is the first time a Cowboys team has returned to the site of a disappointing season-ending performance to open a new one since 1983.

In that case, the Cowboys returned to Washington, where they had lost to the Redskins in the 1982 NFC Championship Game.

The Cowboys haven’t been to an NFC title game since Garrett was an 80 percent passer (albeit a third-string one, going 4-for-5 that year), but at least this provides an immediate test against the division’s best, which became the league’s surprising best in the postseason.

In other words, was the Cowboys’ attempt to overhaul a secondary and find people who could knock passes away from or at least chase down Victor Cruz and Hakeem Nicks successful? Veteran Brandon Carr looked to be well worth those big free-agency dollars with his play during the preseason. First-round cornerback Morris Claiborne showed more at LSU than he did in August, but now his chance has arrived.

We begin to get those answers and more in the rare Wednesday season opener, a game moved off of its traditional Thursday spot so that President Barack Obama could accept his party’s nomination in front of something other than empty chairs.

If anything has elevated the status of the Giants’ Eli Manning to future Hall of Famer besides those two Super Bowl wins, it has to be his play against the Cowboys. In the last three seasons, New York is 5-1 against Dallas and has scored more than 30 points in all five victories. Manning has averaged more than 330 yards passing in those six games while being sacked just four times.

Still, making Manning work harder Wednesday night isn’t the Cowboys’ only task. The Giants reminded us last year that a team can win a Super Bowl without a highly ranked defense if it does one thing really well. In the Giants’ case, they pressure the passer with what has the appearance of three or four (or even five) long, lean defensive ends bursting past linemen and reaching toward the sky.

Jason Pierre-Paul is their sack leader and he had three sacks in the two games against Dallas, but to say he has more help than the Cowboys give DeMarcus Ware is putting it mildly.

“They all look long and big and they can rush up the field, and they can also defend the run,” Garrett said. ”And, again, they have a lot of them. It’s not just one guy.”

It is just one game out of 16, technically. But as we saw last year, one game in New York can make all the difference in the world.

Just because things went badly eight months ago doesn’t mean it has to happen again. The Cowboys have made changes, and a new season has arrived.

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About Tim Cowlishaw

Tim Cowlishaw has been The Dallas Morning News' lead sports columnist since July 1998. Prior to that he covered the Cowboys for six seasons and the Stars for three as a beat reporter. He also covered the Rangers as a backup beat writer and was the San Jose Mercury News' beat writer on the San Francisco Giants in the late 1980s.

Tim has been appearing regularly on ESPN"s "Around the Horn" since the show made its debut in November 2002. He also worked with ESPN as part of the network's "NASCAR Now" coverage in 2007-08.

Favorite Dallas restaurants: Park, Nick and Sam's, Kenichi.

Worst sports prediction: His first in college ... that Earl Campbell had no shot at the Heisman Trophy.

Best sports memories: Seeing the Dallas Stars hoist the Stanley Cup long after midnight in Buffalo, watching the Dallas Cowboys win the Super Bowl and Texas win the national title in perfect Rose Bowl settings.